Star Wars is back in the loop, with the “news” that Kathleen Kennedy is once again leaving her role as Lucasfilm president, to be replaced by Dave Filoni and Lynwen Brennan. We’re also getting the first Star Wars film in seven years, due to hit theatres in May.

With all this commotion, it might seem like the franchise is heading in a new direction, but my prediction for its future would have to be “wait and see”.

It’s hard to say exactly what will change over the next couple of years (assuming Kennedy actually leaves this time). It’s clear that Filoni has his own view of how a galaxy far, far away should be handled. He has his own characters he wants to use, and his own stories he wants to tell. As the “Heir to George Lucas”, this could bring the franchise back on track, and provide some much-needed creative focus to get things moving in one direction.

That’s the theory at least. For myself, I’ve fallen out with Filoni over the last couple of years. I think The Clone Wars and Rebels were great shows, but he seems incapable of producing anything original that isn’t just self-reference and nostalgia for those two shows. After the criminally boring Ahsoka, which featured the Temu Grand Admiral Prawn, I don’t have any faith that he can deliver something truly special anymore. On top of that, he’s been involved with many of the streaming shows produced in the last few years, including Kenobi, working under the title of Chief Creative Officer, so he has to take some responsibility for how awful they were.

It’s clear that there won’t be any more shows like Andor, which take a darker and more “realistic” approach to the galaxy (which is no bad thing); that’s not his style at all. Rather you can expect a lot of cameos, shows about his favourite creations from The Clone Wars, and lots of Ahsoka.

The thing that might derail him is that he won’t be all-powerful. Aside from the Disney overlords who pay the bills, he’ll also have to work with co-leader Brennan, who will handle the executive side of things. This could prevent him from indulging his excesses, though the fact that no one thought The Acolyte was a bad idea suggests it’s very much “anything goes” at Lucasfilm.

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What likely will happen is that he’ll hold the strings much tighter where other creatives are concerned. It’s no secret that Dave Filoni considers himself George Lucas’s successor, after being trained by him on The Clone Wars. He’ll likely want to keep them from straying from vision, and in particular from damaging his legacy characters.

What exactly those projects will be is the big question.

The franchise hasn’t enjoyed any real successes since The Rise of Skywalker, except The Mandalorian, which was largely thanks to Baby Yoda. As a result, they don’t have anything to build off going forward. The sequels aren’t a new beginning, they’re an end; an end to everything people loved about Star Wars. Despite the hype over The Hunt for Ben Solo, that doesn’t translate into real-world dollars. It’s incredible how many people still confuse Kylo Ren with Darth Vader.

Likewise, despite its success, The Mandalorian has little to capitalize on in terms of character or story potential. After just two seasons its flimsy premise was already starting to crack under the weight of its plot, granted the writers didn’t help by giving Din Djarin a character circle rather than an arc, but it was more a pleasant diversion from the disaster of the sequels than a new, exciting start for the franchise.

As Star Wars prepares for its big-screen return with two consecutive releases in 2026-2027, I think we’ll have to “wait and see” how they perform before we can guess what happens next–I’m sure that’s what the Disney-Lucasfilm execs are doing right now.

Can The Mandalorian and Grogu still rely on that green little critter to bring in the bucks? Will Star Wars: Starfighter revive the brand with new characters and a new era that can be spun out into more sequels? We’ll have to wait and see.

Of the dozens of potential Star Wars projects that have come and gone in the last decade, there are three that have seemed to be constants. The Rey movie, which may launch a new trilogy about the Skywalker/Palpatine/Plutt lineage; James Mangold’s Dawn of the Jedi movie, supposed to tell the story of the Jedi’s founding; and Patty Jenkins Rogue Squadron adaptation. These are three widely different stories set in different time periods. Making them all would be more of the scattergun approach taken by Lucasfilm so far. As a result, I don’t expect any of them to go into production until Starfighter releases. That is, if they are smart…

Beyond that, anything goes. I don’t believe there will be a fourth season of The Mandalorian, despite Jon Favreau saying he has the scripts ready, but if the movie is a huge success, it could be rushed into production or reworked into a sequel.

As has been the case since Disney first acquired the brand, it’s almost impossible to guess what will happen next, what will be the next project announced, and whether or not it will ever even get made, never mind appeal to the fans. In short, all I can say is we’ll have to wait and see.

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